


Redemption

by Muirin007



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: Erik - Freeform, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I kept coming back to it, Mild Gore, Phantom of the Opera - Freeform, Poor Erik, This one took me what like three years to write?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 14:25:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6988930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muirin007/pseuds/Muirin007
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I did not know my age. I scarcely remembered my name. I had long since surrendered my voice and my life along with it...And so I ran."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redemption

            The rain fell in torrents that morning, drumming a staccato upon the surface of the stream that wound its solitary way toward Privas. The town lay several kilometers off, shut away from the relentless din of the storm, its silk factories craning their mournful stone facades to peer listlessly over the horizon. The listless glare of their distant windows was curiously comforting, as if they were too weary to care for the creature that peered at its rain-dimpled, wavering reflection in the water.

            The thing sealed beneath the water’s surface stared at me with sunken eyes.

            Dulled by the fog of fever and starvation, I did not immediately register that the distorted reflection was my own.

            _How,_ I wondered, _can such a wretch count itself among the living?_ My detached revulsion mingled with numbed sympathy—such a withered wraith it was, such an abject monstrosity that it seemed scarcely fit to drag itself out of the earth and across the grassy expanse that fanned the water’s edge.

            I blinked. The creature blinked back, and my hollow stomach turned at the movement. Exquisite perversion. It was emaciated, mummified. It wore nothing but a moldering pair of trousers fashioned from burlap that called to mind a rudimentary burial shroud. Its skin was so pale as to appear nearly translucent, stretched like a drum over jagged bones and roped with wounds. Its face was that of all men consigned to the inevitable.

            Death emblazoned upon an animated being.

            It had no nose, merely a gaping hole ringed with glistening refuse that opened into its skull. Its cheekbones jutted over tendons stretched tautly over shadowed recesses of musculature. Its thin slash of a mouth hung open slightly and its eyes—glassy, bloodshot yellow orbs—stared dully at me from within twin cavernous recesses.

            I recoiled from it and retched violently into a nearby bush, rivulets of rain winding through the mess of hair that hung like cords of black seaweed in my periphery. Every bone in my body quivered in protest lest I should see the _thing_ again. Somewhere in the sickened recesses of my mind, I knew escape would prove futile. Death had sewn itself into my skin. It sputtered out in every rattling gasp, battered against my ribcage as if howling for release, expanded with every inhale and then wilted back again into sulking silence with every exhale. It shook my limbs, knocked my arms out from beneath me and sent me collapsing in a heap into the muddy bank.

            I curled like a burning ember in upon myself, hands cradling my head, fingers digging into my skull as if to drag its horrors out and cast them away into the river. An act of penance, genuflection before the cavernous divine.

            Absolution would never come.

            I heard a faint moan. Death’s, perhaps. Quite possibly my own. The difference was negligible.

            Motion. Incessant motion. The trembling would not cease. My eyes squeezed shut, yet still the blackness plunged me into turbulence, still I felt like a raft tossed about in a tempest—turbulent, adrift.

            Alone.

            I was fifteen. Or thereabouts. My circumstances had robbed me of the luxury of chronology. The estimate stems from my haphazard tracking of the years, the tick marks etched into the dirt floor of the cage, carefully traced with a forefinger and then quickly erased as the iron prison jostled in the caravan, as the whip hurled itself across my vertebrae, curled around and in between my ribs, slid back and took strips of skin with it and sent me skidding across the floor, across the tick marks until they dissolved. The marks never lasted long. Erased, as if the world revolted against my very existence and sought to remove any attachment I attempted to forge with life—age, a name, a voice.

            I did not know my age. I scarcely remembered my name. I had long since surrendered my voice and my life along with it.

            Perhaps, I thought dully as I struggled to focus on a blade of grass slick with rain, perhaps life had never been mine to surrender. Perhaps I had unwittingly forfeited it at birth.

            I had been running, stumbling, faltering. Moving on and forward, yet toward what, I did not know. I knew only that I moved _away_ —away from the iron bars, from the hay and dirt and the filth strewn beneath me, from the black body of the whip, from the calloused hand that wielded it and the callous soul that did its bidding.

            Away from bulging dead eyes and the gaping fleshy mouth. Away from the blood that bubbled from it, first in a frantic froth, then with all the languid slowness of a serpent, siding in tendrils down into the coarse dark mass of a beard. Away from the glinting blade of a dagger submerged in a bloated, motionless abdomen.

            Away from my heaving chest, my bloodied handprint curled like a noose around the dagger’s hilt.

            And so I ran.

            Another rattling moan shook out into the damp air, then quickly dried to nothing. My own, and yet I was utterly estranged from it. My bones were not my own. I had never asked for them. Ribs and iron bars were one in the same. I wanted only to shrink and slip between them and into oblivion.

            But I could not evade the sear of memory. In the haze of delirium, it scarcely even felt like my own yet plagued me still from a distance—Waiting, watching.

            My eyelids felt leaden.

            _Waiting, watching._

            I would not die free.

            _Watching…_

I would not die…

            _Watching…_

A figure emerged from the thicket of trees before me. It was indistinct, bowed and dark and slowly drawing nearer.

            I felt nothing.

            Let it claim me, then, I thought. What right have I to breathe any longer? Let it come. God, let it come.

            Its footsteps squelched in the mud, and it grunted softly as it moved. I saw its progression only through a blurred, narrow slit of vision.

            Its boots finally stopped before me, sunken into the soaked mud of the earth and supported by a cane. The voice belonging to the boots grunted, and I watched as the bottom of the wooden cane disappeared. A second later, I felt a cautious prodding in my side. Light, gentle.

            Its touch was careful but nonetheless provoked unbearable agony. Every inch of me was was consumed in flame. I hissed in pain and felt my shoulders draw up to the base of my skull. My spine arched like the crest of a wave; my jaw tightened into granite.

            The voice mumbled to itself and something rustled. It let out a groan, bending down with effort.

            Its face swam before mine, and its ancient eyes were wide.

            _“Dživdo,”_ it whispered, almost reverently.

            _Alive._

The figure’s quick whispering filtered in and out, and its hands scrambled for something wrapped about its hunched form. I was heavy, part and particle of the rich brown earth that seemed eager to pull me into its deep, muffled cocoon.

            “ _Alive,”_ the figure said again.

            Muggy warmth seeped over me and dragged me gently into nothingness.

* * *

 

            _“Moj dilbere, kud’ se šećeš?_

_“Aj, što i mene ne povedeš._

“ _Povedi me—_ Mmm. Easy.”

            Rough cold brushed across my brow. Bird-like in its softness, eternal in its strength. My muscles flinched of their own accord.

            “Easy. Don’t tense now.” Heavily accented French. Cracked, yet unmistakably firm.

            Swaths of muddy color flickered dimly before me, moving slowly, laboriously. A heavy warmth upon my chest, arms, legs. An insistent pressure upon my left shoulder, something sliding beneath it, cupping my back, conforming itself to the peaks of my shoulder blades, pressing into them and urging me gently upwards.

            “Can you drink?”

            I could not speak.

             “A bit, just a bit,” said the voice.

            Silence, sloshing.

            “Come now. You must drink…easy, easy…”

            My body obeyed before my mind could process the command. Something smooth and hard pressed against my mouth, and then ambrosial coolness flowed across my tongue, over my teeth, and down the raw walls of my throat. Water slid down my jaw and pooled in the recesses behind my clavicle and in the hollow at the base of my throat. Serenity. Absolute, untainted relief.  

            “Easy, _easy,_ there will be more.”

            I trusted the rusted voice implicitly. Curious. I trusted nothing. No one. Why this aged voice?

            The pressure slid out from beneath me, and once more, I sank into soft warmth, still lusting after the water. My fingertips twitched. I heard myself inhale—a death rattle. My abdomen clenched, yet I could not shudder.

            And from that space above me that throbbed with life, the voice resumed its soft croon.

            “ _Povedi me u čaršiju,_

_Aj, pa me prodaj bazardžiji_

_Uzmi za me oku zlata_

_Aj, pa pozlati dvoru vrata.”_

* * *

 

            Time unrolled and offered me only faint glimpses of its workings, clumsily-woven scenes filled with the same muddy bustling of the hunched figure who spun melodies as she held a goblet to my lips. I knew nothing in those dimly-lit hours but the lull of her voice, the sweetness of her water, and the palpable agony that pulsed through me like the drum beating out the last moments of one condemned.

            I have known pain since then. Sharp, pristine, metallic. Yet nothing as primal as that pulse, nothing so antediluvian, so self-annihilating. I was nothing. _It_ was all. I burned away within its searing recesses, dissolved as if plunged into pools of acid. Ached only, throbbed only, lived solely to perish—perpetually denied the cool hush of death while I rolled about in its palms and became its process.

            How she plucked me from its grasp, I shall never know.

            When I saw her clearly for the first time, morning glittered crisp and pale upon the strands of steel-grey hair that escaped her red kerchief. Her gnarled hands busied themselves about the fire, their arthritic angles curling around the kettle’s handle like ancient tree roots.

            She was small, crooked, and hobbled. Again, I was struck by her resemblance to an amaranthine tree. Her skirts rustled like leaves whispering in a breeze. Her skin bore the etched and meandering wear of wood, dark and gathered into innumerable folds, draping beneath her sharp cheekbones like heavy curtains. She appeared carved out of the earth itself, some ageless disciple of Time, witness to the infinite.

            “Awake, hmm?”

            I started. She had not turned around to face me, but instead bent low over a makeshift stove several paces away from where I lay. I’d supposed her oblivious to my gaze.

            I attempted to push myself into a seated position but found my body utterly incapable of the movement. I fell back gracelessly, limbs shaking. My nerves felt shoddily stitched together.

            “Don’t,” she said in her clipped, accented tones, still focused on her task at the stove. “Don’t move. You will hurt yourself further. Stay there.”

            Dimly, I wondered how it was that she saw my pitiful escape attempts without casting a glance my way. Still panting slightly with residual effort, I searched the wall around her.

            The answer came in the form of a small mirror, as cracked and as speckled with age as its owner, hanging over the stovetop. My reflection must have presented itself to her there—

            _My reflection._

Horror fell hot and heavy in my abdomen.

I willed my left hand upward, but it fell, bandaged and trembling, back to my side. The movement had been futile, in any case. I did not need touch to confirm what I knew with terrible certainty to be true. The air brushed against the bruised planes of my face, blowing its traitorous coolness across the mottled skin.

             She had seen. _She had seen._

I squeezed my eyes closed to shut out the terrible realization. My fingers shakily searched the worn linen beneath me for some sort of makeshift mask—anything, _anything_ to be rid of _it._ A scrap of fabric or paper, perhaps a pillowcase— _anything._

Yet I found nothing. Nothing with which to fashion a means to stifle the wretched truth. She had seen, and would see again, and I could not bear it.

            I attempted to roll sideways, to bury my face into the sheets, to run, to flee, yet my body would not obey. My bones were leaden; my muscles had disintegrated to ash. The smallest movement sent shivers ricocheting through my frame and again I fell back, immobilized, drained, and hot with humiliation.

            She let out a low humming noise and slowly turned towards me.

            Frantic, I ducked my head and fought to bring my hand up to cover my face.

            “Don’t,” she repeated sternly. “There’s no need. Lie back.”

             I could not. Despite my protesting injuries, I turned away from her, every fiber within me pulsing with one thought:

            _Don’t let her see, don’t let her see, don’t let her see, don’t—_

A rough hand closed gently over my wrist. I started. I had not even heard her move, so consumed was I with ensuring that she _did not see—_

She pulled my arm away from my face and placed it, softly, back to my side. I did not turn to look at her— _she mustn’t see!—_ but felt her other hand upon my shoulder.

            “Look at me,” she said.

            I let out a shuddering breath.

            _Look at me, beast!_

            _Up! Get up! Look at me!_

_It’s sitting there—_

_In the corner? God, the stench—_

_Beast! You got company. Look at me!_

            _Look at me, you filthy little shit--!_

_Look at me! Mama, Mama please, look at me, why won’t you look--?_

A gasp tore from my throat. She turned my face towards hers.

            Her eyes were striking—deep-set and fathomless black, rheumy and clouded yet unsettlingly sharp. The furrows of her creviced brow drew together and her mouth tightened. She fixed me with a penetrating stare.

            “No need for that,” she said, stressing each syllable. She did not flinch, did not cringe in revulsion, did not turn away.

            “Understand?” she queried after a brief silence. Her voice was as low and as heavy as incense.

            I shook my head incredulously. She raised a brow.

            “No? Don’t understand?”

             “…No,” I whispered.

            Sorrow softened the glint of her eyes and settled into the deep tracks of her face.

             “You don’t need to hide here,” she said quietly.

            Her hand cupped my cheek. My jaw tightened reflexively against it, but its gentle touch remained.

            I struggled to comprehend the weight of what she had said, the weight of her hand upon my mangled skin. She was wrong—I _must_ hide. Surely, she was mistaken.

            My disbelief must have been evident, for something akin to humor winked to life in her eyes.

            “I have seen worse,” she said.

            I balked, incredulous. The edges of her mouth gathered folds as they turned upwards.

            “Oh, yes,” she offered. Such ease in that voice. “Worse, indeed. I am old. I have seen much.”

            I swallowed. My throat burned, still roughened with lack of use. I could not bring myself to look at her for much longer, to subject her to myself, and so I diverted my gaze to where my bandaged hand lay limp upon the quilt.

            “I… _Where?”_ I managed faintly.

            Her chuckle hummed huskily through her nose.

            “Fires, fights, accidents,” she explained, and then, after a brief pause, “Births.”

            I allowed myself a cursory glance up at her before quickly looking away again.

            She sniffed. Her gnarled hand patted my cheek maternal care, and still, I could not bear to look at her. Would that she had not _seen—_

            “What is your name, boy?”

            A moment passed as I wondered at the query. Innocuous enough, yet puzzling. I felt my brows draw together, the movement painful beneath my bruised temples.

            Her carved face peeked at mine, her own brow similarly twisted in concern.

            “What—no, no, don’t look away; at me, at me…What is your name?” she repeated, slowly, deliberately, as if the question implied a matter of great importance.

            A knot seized my throat. I swallowed to rid it, yet to no avail. The name hung in my mind’s periphery, yet I refused to voice its lie. It had never been my own, not truly. The firmness of being, the surety of self were never mine to claim. I was doubly damned—speak the name, and I spoke deception. Tell her the truth, I reasoned, and she would not understand.

            _I am no one._

“Do you not remember?” Her kerchiefed head cocked slightly to the side. “Hmm?”

            _Nothing. I remember nothing. All is—nothing—tangled, fragmented. Nothing._

And yet the “I”—the “I” still flickered stubbornly.

_I_ am, something feebly protested within me. _I_ am. 

“That’s alright,” she said kindly with another sniff. Her knotted fingers gently found my own. “You will.”

            With great effort, she rose, her back bowed beneath the weight of decades, eyes glittering with the wealth of years as she shuffled back towards the boiling kettle.

            Her voice rattled back at me from over her shoulder.

            “They can’t take that from you.”

* * *

 

            “You are a musician.”

            My fingers tensed around the geometric weave of the quilt, its pattern suddenly too severe.

            “I heard you.” Her pipe bobbed up and down as she spoke, tracing lazy furls of smoke about her face. “Watched you play.”

            I shot her a glance before turning away.

            “…You saw?” I asked quietly.

             “I did.”                     

            Several days had passed and the rain had sharpened into a biting cold that threatened snow. I remained enfeebled, drained dry and utterly exhausted. She’d shorn my matted hair into a clean crop, dressed my wounds with expert care, and replaced my rags with warm bedclothes. The realization that it must have been necessary for her to undress me in order to do so was dimly horrifying, and so I stuffed the thought into silence.

            I slept endlessly, welcoming the oblivion and secretly relishing her tender ministrations in my waking moments. I’d waited for cruelty, yet it never came. She kept her vespers at the stove or at my bedside, dressing my wounds, offering me food and drink, commenting only when she felt she would not intrude. She seemed to possess an intrinsic understanding of my need for distance, yet was careful to ensure that I was not alone. I did not understand it. I doubted that I ever would.

            I attempted a response, but found to my frustration that my voice remained raw from disuse. After a terse cough, I tried again.

            “When?” The syllable was frayed, hoarse.

            “Months ago,” she said, scratching a nostril. “Up north, near the springs. I do not know what you played. I do know that it was beautiful.”

            _Up north near the springs…_ My mind fought to identify a precise location, but in the darkness of the cage and the tent, I hadn’t the faintest idea which way was up, let alone where the fair had been situated. I knew life only when I was permitted to escape into the notes of the violin. Time liquefied then, and I gratefully drowned within it.

            And I felt, I felt, I _felt._

            My neck prickled as her gaze bore into me.

            “You have,” she said, “great talent.”

            I stared fixedly at the quilt.

            “More than great,” she continued. “I have never seen playing like yours—and I have seen much.”

            The fire crackled merrily in the hearth across from where I lay. Its heat fell unassumingly upon the exposed skin of my face.

            “Thank you.” The courtesy fell awkwardly, clumsy upon my tongue after eons of coarseness.

            Her answering watery cough contained a hint of a chuckle. I risked an inquiring glance her way.

            “So polite,” she said with a smile. “Polite, and—ah, what is it?”

            After a beat of silence, I realized her question was not rhetorical and shook my head, at a loss.

            She snapped her fingers, and pointed one my way.

            “Virtuoso.” The pipe in her mouth bobbed, punctuating each syllable. “Polite and a virtuoso. You will play for kings one day.”

            I could have laughed, but I hadn’t force enough left for humor. A curt shake of the head would have to suffice.

            “Why?” came her answering inquiry.

            I said nothing.

            “No, no, look at me,” she said, and her words, miraculously, were kind. “It’s alright. Can you look at me?”

            Haltingly, I obeyed. My eyes, at least, I could fix elsewhere, at a spot slightly above her left shoulder. The familiar mantra once again began its insistent thrumming.

            _Do not look at me, do not look at me, do not look at me, do not---_

            “Why ‘no?’” she asked, as curiously as if she had been in the company of a bosom companion. Still she did not recoil. She merely waited.

            My mind was stagnant with illness and struggled to unravel her motivations, the significance of her open expression, the force of her regard—earnest, keen, and wholly, remarkably _unafraid._

_Why?_

What did she want with me? 

            “I am sorry,” I confessed. “I do not understand.”

            She canted her kerchiefed head.

            “Why do you say no?” she clarified patiently, kindly— _kindly!_ “You cannot know what the future holds, boy. Why would you not play for the world?”

            _Because it does not want me._

            _Because I should not want_ it.

            “Because…” _Why did she look at me so? Why did she not recoil?_

            I swallowed, managing only a halfhearted gesture toward the culprit.

            She hummed muskily through her nose. “What of it?”

            A pause. I blinked.

            “It…” I began, at a loss to explain such an obvious barrier. I found myself wondering if she was mad. What else could explain her nonchalant dismissal of such a face? “It is not…I cannot—“

            “It has not stopped you yet, has it?”

            I looked at her directly then, startled by the question. Her answering stare was calm.

            “You played,” she said intently. “You played and they came for you.”

            “For my—for— _this_ ,” I said, motioning again toward the horror.

            Her jaw bobbed as she huffed out a plume of smoke. “At first they came for that. But they returned—and _stayed_ —for the song. Like magic. When you play, they stay for the music.”

            A tightness seized my throat. I swallowed it.

            “I looked for you,” she said. Her eyes felt as if they bore into the deepest recesses of my soul. The sensation of being stripped bare—vulnerable once more—was nauseating. Yet her words were not barbed, merely soft and inquiring. Her tone was no less puzzling than her simple declaration.

            “Looked for me?” I asked, baffled.

            She nodded. “I watched you play. Returned twice to watch you play, and I saw the chains. You were not well.”

            _Not well,_ I thought. The phrase rung hollowly like a coin clattering into a well. The understatement would have been comical had I retained any vestige of humor.

She grunted harshly. For the first time, the crevices and crags of her face appeared too sharp, etched too forcefully into her skin. Anger, low and simmering, whet its blade in her words.

            “I knew him,” she said. “The owner, your keeper. A cruel man. No heart—blackness from the time he was a boy.”

            I shifted, gritting my teeth against the memory. The weight of his blood had seeped into mine, where it curdled itself into place. _An eye for an eye._

New fetters.

            “You had no choice.”

            My jaw stiffened.

            “Did you hear me?”

            I blew out a sputtering breath. “Please—“

            “No. Listen.” She rose with great effort and shuffled over to the bedside, her pipe jerking in time with her unsteady gait. She planted herself firmly next to me and again, pinned me beneath that stare. I turned away reflexively yet she did not act to remedy the movement. Instead she spoke, her gnarled fingers gripping my arm.

            “He would have killed you.”

            I shook my head.

            _Yes._

            “His life was your right.”

            “No—“

            “Then you were to lie there and let him grind you away? Are you so small, boy?”

            “I —There must have—“

            “There was no other way,” she said. “No, no—I want you to look. Look at me...Defense, is all. Survival. It was your right. Your _right…_ _There was no other way._ ”

            My nails dug into my scalp and still I shook my head, rebuking her insistence on the righteousness of the unforgiveable.

            “Are you so small?” she repeated. “So small that your death at his hands is a mercy?”

            _Erasure._ The thought came tinged with a dulled bliss. To cease, to stop, to _not_ were all enticing possibilities. _All_ would be _none;_ death at his hands would have relieved me of _Am,_ stripped me even of _Was._ Death beyond negation. Complete dissolution.

            It would have been as if I had never existed.

            A strange, thrilling possibility. It was the natural order. This stubborn insistence on living surely violated some intrinsic piety of being. Why else this torment, this suffering? Oblivion was a welcome, necessary recourse. And I had denied myself that manna.

            A dead bit of rote filtered its way back into my memory.

            _Thou shalt not kill._

_Thou shalt not kill._

_Mama, please--!_

_Thou shalt not_

_You are hanging by a slender thread._

_Thou shalt_

_And whosoever was not found written_

_Not_

_In the book of life_

_Kill_

_Was cast into the lake of fire—_

I lurched forward with a cry, my fingertips seeking the flames yet meeting nothing, my heart seeking the sting of divine vengeance yet feeling nothing—damnation, hellfire, an inkling of I Am, of perpetuity that would flay me alive, yet there remained only nothing, nothing, _nothing_ , a terrible blankness, insensate, adrift.

            I fell.

            From where I lay upon the gritty floor, muscles dried to salt and heaving, the old woman wrapped me in an iron embrace and crooned.

             “You fought. You fight. You _fight.”_

* * *

 

            Progress is a curiously menial diversion.

            I remained largely bed-ridden for well-nigh three months, watching the daylight bloom and die through the window above the wash basin. I traced the grain on the wooden ceiling with such precision that I committed its tracks to memory.

            At the close of the first month, she placed me in the caravan’s sole chair—a battered, thatched bit of wicker—and slowly, painstakingly pushed it through the door. The crisp mid-morning air trailed into my lungs like an absolution.

            There was no one to see, she assured me time and time again, no one who knew of our slow trek across the sparsely-populated wooded swath of country. Yet left to myself in the rattling caravan whenever she drove the horses forward to lands unknown, I felt the nagging Gaze return, a universal subjection that sought to expel me from existence. Ungrounded, perhaps—I caught no glimpse of another living soul the entire way, merely woodland and bedewed open fields—yet I felt keenly the weight of the truth.

            I would always be prey.

            She had objected vehemently when I tore a scrap of linen off the pillowcase, fashioning eye holes with the knife she used for whittling and cooking and then securing the makeshift mask into place with a bit of twine I’d spotted by the kettle.

            However thin and unobtrusive the linen, the air was barred from me once more. I chose to consider it salvation. The liberty of anonymity. I breathed freely only beneath that barrier.

             She regarded it as sin.

            “You needn’t hide,” she repeated with building intensity. “Not from me.”

            The day shone as if freshly-laundered. Wind trailed along the rim of my eyelids.

            “For others,” I replied automatically, no longer caring if she understood or heard the undercurrent in my words: _for me. Grant me this._

            Her answering sigh told me that a part of her did. That part of her wearied of the idealism she nursed with the stubbornness of a child. But the child within her refused to relent.

            “Your hands, then,” she said.

            I fixed her with a puzzled stare, the tension in my neck gone beneath the mask. I could look now, study, observe—hidden once more, I was no longer seen. I saw.

            As did she. As always. Her eyes glittered like obsidian and her hands took mine, gently uncurling my fingers. I had not even been aware that they were clenched.

            Her roughened thumb found my palm and massaged out its knots before moving to the other. She inhaled slowly, deeply.

            “Now. Hold them out. Like so.”

            She spread her own as wide as her arthritic joints would allow, reaching forward until no crease was left unilluminated by the sunlight.

            I mimicked her gesture, spreading my fingers until the skin of my palm pulled taut. They flirted with the grotesque, those hands, pale and skeletal and utterly at odds with the pastels of the meadow.

            It was the first time in an age that I’d felt the warmth of daylight. The sensation was alien, uncomfortable—all was too bright, too intensely-colored, too, too vivid. Richly textured tree bark, the dancing verdure, the blades of grass swaying in the wind, playing the line of the horizon with the flurried ease of a pianist’s fingers. And all the while that warmth, an insistent pressure, a vitality seeping into the bone white creases of my palms and then dissolving beneath the skin in soothing ripples.

            A wild thing within me wanted to fall forward, spread-eagle upon the earth.

I indulged it for a moment—only a moment—and tilted my face skyward. My relief at the sensation drew a low hum from the very bottom of my lungs.

            Warmth, warmth, warmth.  

            “Don’t lose it,” I heard the old woman say.

            My eyes slid shut. The sky felt blue against my lids. Heavy and thick in my palms.

            The linen mask fluttered up in a breeze before settling against my skin with the gentle finality of an exhale.

            _Don’t lose it._

* * *

 

            I spent my days assisting her with chores and the horses as my strength permitted and one day, when I could walk unassisted, she gave me the violin.

            I took it gingerly, the zing of a long-buried thrill buzzing at my fingertips.

            “How--?”

            “It isn’t your old one, I’m afraid,” she said, handing me the bow. “This is from a merchant in the next town.”

            The instrument was clearly secondhand, well-used if the scuffs on the varnish and the fraying bowstrings were any indication.

            “Will it do?” The edges of her ancient mouth were drawn tight. “You must have something better, I know. And this one is old—“

            “Thank you.”

            I said it as forcefully as I’d said anything in my life. The life in those words startled her into a relieved smile. She shook her head bemusedly and waved a hand in my direction.

            “Well, play, play. Have at it.”

            “ _Thank you,_ ” I said again, knowing I could not possibly convey the magnitude of what she had given me. At long last, I nestled the instrument atop my shoulder, muttering those senseless, fervent “thank yous” with such dedication that she chuckled.

            Standing carefully, I drew the bow across the strings and felt a leap of pleasure at the sound—unsullied richness. I could have ceased to be at that moment, could have died happily along with that single note.

            Yet as if of their own accord, my fingers resurrected a voice. Mozart. The second movement of the violin concerto no. 5  

            Silently, unassumingly, something colossal and infinite began to rise again, rusted and starved though it was. Fighting off strands of lingering weakness, I stumbled over several notes and cared not a whit.

            The liquidity, the great mind of that music beckoned and breathed within me and I saw nothing but its golden sound, the whirl of its possibility, the pulse that was All.

            I could have expanded infinitely into the silvered chill of the clouds, the winding musk of the earth, out and beyond and still the sound would _Be—_ curled in the proscenium arch, shooting up through the church organ’s massive gleaming pipes, an unshakeable, immortal undercurrent.

            I lived. My fingers sped to keep time with that pulse and Mozart gave way to the darkened intricacies of a folk song that had dazzled onlookers at the fair.

            Yet the iron bars were gone. No shackles tore at my wrists and ankles. I played at liberty.

            And the tune was all the more frantic for it, tasting its freedom for the first time and downing it with a glutton’s wild abandon. The bow sawed itself into a mad blur, snapping a string with a discordant twang and still I played.

            I lived.

When it was done, I was breathless, dizzied, shoulders heaving. I saw only that golden melody forever expanding without and within.

            Something rustled to my right and eyes glazed, I sought the source.

            The old woman’s hand found mine.

            Perhaps I sought an anchor, or perhaps I wished to indulge a bit of selfishness in relishing the pride—strange thing—that swam in her eyes. Perhaps it was another iteration of gratitude. Whatever the case, I did not pull away.

* * *

 

            By the close of the year, I knew I had to take my leave.

            I was as well as I would ever be. My strength had largely returned, my body naturally consigned to the wiry gauntness of the grave yet healed. Scarred hideously, but really, with one such as myself, was additional flaying truly lamentable? The raised welts across my limbs and torso tightened and had begun fading, yet panged still—irrefutable reminders of what I was. Perhaps, I thought with detached amusement, the transformation was complete.

            She denied all of it, as was her wont. You are no obscenity, she seemed to say, no more than I.

            I think I truly loved her conviction. And in some way, as clearly as I knew how, I think I loved her.

            She protested furiously when the time came for my departure.

            “Where will you go?” she asked over and over. “Where will you go?”

            “Where will any of us go?” I replied. Cryptically, I thought.  Yes, that's it. Veil the uncertainty with good-natured theatrics.

            That earned me a withering glare. The truth was I did not know the answer any more than she. Uncertainty confronted me like a great, blank monolith. The only certainty was darkness, the safety of the shadows. Consign yourself to the shadows and you will live.

            …And what? Living itself was a sort of triumph, a continual defiance of an order that sought to expel me.

            But living and _what?_

            The only “and” that occurred to me was music, that golden pulse. It had only ever been music. That expansion. Possibility. Potential, progression.

            I would roam. Steal and swindle if I must—dwelling in shadows left little room for morality—but roam, move, walk the very continent if I had to, so long as I was never stationary again, always moving, progressing, building. I would seek my own darkened brand of liberty.

            And I would not think on that knife, nor the blood on my hands, nor the gaping dead mouth in the tent, though all were cemented within me, sealing something distantly sinister. I would not think of the relief that grew in the wake of the death, nor the momentary swell of something terrible, luxuriant and vast. It was the same force when I sang and played, the same force behind transmutation of the grotesque into the beautiful, the same force that captivated those faces beyond the bars, robbing them of speech and agency and conferring it to me at last.

            But I would not think on it. I would not.

            I would move. I would build.  

            “Where?” Her mouth was pinched again.

            “Italy,” I said automatically. We were near the border then. I wanted to see the legacy of the ancients, to unearth their secrets. I wanted answers. Any answers. 

            I wanted away, as far away as possible from France.

            She knew, despite her protestations, that this was best. There where whispers, always whispers in the villages we passed: The old woman harbored a ghost whose music was perverse, unholy in its skill. It rang out at night, seeped into dreams, taunted, tantalized. She was a witch, perhaps, some relic of superstitious ages past that refused to die. Dangerous. She’d the devil at her back and he commandeered a violin.

            The devil prolonged their parting as long as he possibly could.

            Terribly selfish, yet I could not bear to leave her without a word. I should have, as I very well knew, should have departed while she slept and freed her of the burden of those whispers without a sound. But I was young. Uncertain, frightened despite myself, though I’d rather have been drawn and quartered than confess it.

            She had saved my life, after all, paltry thing though it was. Her care baffled me. I struggled for the why of it all.

            Once while tending the horses in a twilight-shaded copse of trees, I asked her as much.

            Her ageless black gaze gleamed, and I was momentarily struck with the disorienting notion that she was not of this earth.

            When she did not immediately answer my question, I repeated it, thinking that perhaps she had not heard yet knowing very well that she had.

            “You know why,” she replied simply. “You have shown it to me a thousand times, a thousand ways. And even if you had not, my son, you are worthy of it.”

            “Of what?” I asked, the urgency clipping my tone. The horse whinnied, as if sensing my confusion. “Worthy of what?”

            Again that calm smile tinged with mischief as she shook her head, again that sense that in her I had been afforded a glimpse of something fathomless. It unsettled me. I could not abide ambiguity unless I orchestrated it. I still cannot.

            “Will you not tell me?” I pleaded.

            “It is not my truth to tell,” she said. “It is yours. You know it.”

            “I do not,” I insisted.

            Her laugh was a low wisp of musk. “You do. You know it very well. You live it.”

            I blew out a frustrated sigh that sounded curiously like the horse’s. Patting the mare on her neck, I retrieved the violin from where it leaned against the caravan’s worn wooden door.

            “You are being intentionally cryptic,” I muttered as I positioned the instrument beneath my chin and readied the bow.

            Her low chuckle bloomed into a laugh that sounded for all the world like that of a woman decades younger.

            “Now you know how it feels,” she said. Toothless smile, gathered eyes. Something warmed deep within me.

* * *

 

            I wavered on the doorstep of the caravan that gray autumn morning, a heavy knapsack of provisions slung over one shoulder and the violin swinging at my side in its case.

            “You have the cakes I made you?” she asked for what was perhaps the sixth time.

            The pines shot their deep emerald spires into the sky.

            “Yes,” I answered. “I have them.”

            “And the water? The wine?”

            “Yes.” Dimly I recognized the chill of the breeze, but did not trouble myself with wrapping the cloak tighter about my shoulders.

            “The money?”

            I nodded. A lie. I could not accept her meager store of earnings. I would manage. When she’d been otherwise occupied, I’d replaced them in the wooden box where they sat beneath the bed, along with a note that, I hoped, would express everything I could not voice.

        _How to express such profound gratitude?_

            She licked her lips and nodded curtly, looking down at her boots.

_How to express such love?_

            “I want you,” she began, “To take care.”

            “I will.” Another lie, though I did not recognize it as such at the time.

            “In everything.”

            “I will.”

            Her crooked hands sought the linen mask and almost instinctually, I flinched just out of reach.

            “Please,” I said quietly, horrified at the quaver in my voice and at my own insensitivity.

            Though her expression was pained, she acquiesced, instead gathering me in an embrace that was remarkably forceful for a woman of her age. The knapsack and violin case fell to the earth.

            There we stood for what seemed an age, she, holding steadfast to me and breathing shakily; I towering over her bent frame and feeling the urge to kneel at her feet. I breathed in the scent of her—wooden, musked incense, mystery, warmth—touching her kerchief, her knitted shawl, the pendulous gray braid that swung over her crooked back and thought of the preciousness of it all, her endless well of mercy and will.

            When we finally drew apart, the chill rushing to fill the severed space between us, she reached into the pocket of her skirts. 

            “This is yours,” she said quite suddenly, holding something small between her index finger and thumb.

            A ring. A plain gold band burnished to brilliance, strung upon a thin, brown leather cord.

            “I cannot—“

            “Bend down.”

            “I cannot—“

            “You would refuse a gift?”

            “No, I—“

            “Mmm. Then bend down, if you are a gentleman.”

            I stared at her for a moment, swallowed the pain building in my throat, let out a watery laugh and obliged. She slipped the cord about my neck, and tucked it in into my collar so that the gold lay cold and hard against my chest.

            “Here," she said, patting her heart.

            I found I could not summon the words and fought a traitorous stinging in the corners of my eyes.

            “Someone gave that to me many years ago when I was young,” she explained. “Someone I loved. And now it is yours.”

            There was a moment of silence. I drank in the sight of her, the golden token now warming as it settled against my pulse.

            “Is there nothing--” I stopped, clearing my throat. Struggling. I tried again. “Is there nothing I can do in return?”

            “You have already done more than you know,” she said simply. “Live.  Play your music. Wear that. Remember me as I will remember you. And one day, you will give it to one you love. And one who loves you in return.”

            An impossibility, I thought. She paused and leaned in.

            “Love is what you can do,” she said emphatically. “You have it in bounds. Do not lose that. Never lose that. You must promise me.”

            “…I promise.”

            She nodded again, sighed, and stepped back.

            Silence. 

            I coughed and retrieved the pack and the violin case mechanically, feeling rather raw. The meadow before us stretched into the distant wood, the dew of the previous night’s rain shower still lingering on the dying grass and the tips of the pine needles, still darkening the moss underfoot.

            It was quite beautiful.

            “Now,” she said sturdily. “Go.”

            Finding I could not speak, I turned and walked. The stride was not purposeful, but it was movement. Progression.

            I’d walked several paces when I heard her call.

            “Erik!”

            I wheeled around, startled. Not once had I told her that name, a foreign relic. Not once had I uttered it or acknowledged it in her presence. Not once.

            _How--?_

            Her skirts swirled about her in the wind, her kerchief coming loose and sending iron strands of hair fluttering about her face.

             “You will do wonders!” she called with conviction.

            And, leaning on her cane for support, she turned and disappeared through the doorway of the caravan.

            I stood for a moment, studying the spot where she had stood. Then, I, too, turned and walked, the gold ring beating a rhythm against my chest.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the actors who played Erik on Broadway (his name escapes me at the moment) theorized about the origins of the ring Erik later gives Christine. The actor said that when he was performing, he imagined that someone who once cared about Erik gave him the ring, which he eventually gives to Christine as a token of his love. 
> 
> I wondered who in his life would have fit that bill. Certainly not his mother. Or his father (I've always had a head canon that Erik knows very, very little about his father). Not Nadir--I wanted the ring to come earlier. And then I started thinking about his time in captivity in the fair and based on the level of brutality there (or at least the brutality I imagine), I doubted Erik would be able to survive his escape without some help. Enter what may be a somewhat trope-y, strong, awesome grandma figure with a dubious supernatural bent (because strong grandmas are my favorite), and there you go.
> 
> Because at the end of it all, Phantom is a story about love: romantic, sexual, platonic, familial, love for your passions and love for the beauty of human connection. Which is what redeems Erik in the end. :)


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